(This essay contains spoilers, but this manga is nearly plotless)

I have a hard time explaining burn-out to anyone. I know many people that have been through it, and I know they understand it at least as well as I do, but these past few years have been so overwhelming that I feel the need to struggle for the right combinations of words, the right orders and timings of those combinations so that I can seem myself, however obliquely, in a description I place down. Ikeda Takashi “Ms. Unemployed 34 Year Old” was the first manga, the first narrative really, I have seen that is both mild enough in its depictions and quiet enough in its happenings to really let me breathe and spend time with this feeling. These days a thing that has helped me do the dishes is an exercise in imagination. I imagine the space behind my forehead. I imagine the fluid that holds my brain, and I imagine my brain’s frontmost tissue. Everytime I do this, this is a lightness that comes to mind. I’ve heard from psychiatrists that keeping your blood sugar high during mentally exhausting tasks can help people with ADHD stay focused. I drink some soda or a sports drink and imagine it going straight to this place. It doesn't really change my mood or convince me that I have fed my frontal lobe in some substantial way, but it does allow me to turn on the water in the kitchen. “Ms. Unemployed 34 Year Old” understands these rituals, both in their frailty and necessity.

I saw shades of myself reflected in Ms. Unemployed as she began to need longer and more complex bargaining periods to do basic tasks. This has come in waves in my life but around 2018 suddenly things I took for granted began to take some of my allotted energy. Showers were easy if I could convince myself to wet my hair, but the issue was the initial spray of water. I wanted to brush my teeth but it suddenly was as taxing as cooking something simple. Taking out the trash is something Ms. Unemployed and I both struggle with. Her troubles waking up on time are something thats only intermittent to me, but still as she talks and speaks of these signs as her ‘degrading’ the back of my mind insists this hardship is temporary, that I will come out of this healed in some fashion, at some point.

The thing that draws me to write about this story however is how carefully it places the connecting narrative around this central feeling. Ms. Unemployed is recently divorced and lost her job due the stress she built up as a mother, wife, and employee. She doesn't see her daughter very often. She has enough money saved up to avoid getting a job for a year and decides to take it off. The majority of the story is her in stasis, but on the ends and edges you can see the people in her life looking in, or trying to.

I think this somewhat sneaky way Ikeda Takashi complicates a narrative of the tension between relaxation and depression is really what enables these scenes of her struggling to use a new vacuum cleaner to work. She is cleaning up to see her daughter. She is waking up early to memorize the dance of a magical girl show her daughter loves. She relaxes because she hates how she acted towards her family when her busy schedule wound her tight enough to snap. When she cleans up her apartment, when she moves out ready to work, I can see a version of myself that I am working towards as I pick up more shifts at work and cook more of my own meals again.